So Darkness I Became
by blueowls
Summary: You have to fight to get out of the Nightosphere—there's no one left to summon you, and you can't just leave, unlike your wife and daughter.


Humans and their wars.

You have to fight to get out of the Nightosphere—there's no one left to summon you, and you can't just _leave_, unlike your wife and daughter.

As ruler of the Nightosphere, you have duties, meetings, business to attend to, and that little caveat that you have to be called away to be able to leave. But it's been too long. Your family was supposed to be back by now, and so you suppose you'll have to go and get them.

You can imagine it already—your daughter, Marceline, staring at everything silent and wide-eyed, and your wife showing her the human world, telling her about _cars_ and _washing machines_ and _fries_—things you yourself don't quite understand. You imagine that the moon is out, no sun to harm your family, and that they are perhaps sitting up in some tree, watching humans pass by, fascinated by their _refrigerators_ and _strollers_ and _baseball gloves_.

But no. The sight that greets you once you surface is a horrible one, even for you.

There is only a cold, stinging rain that falls in sheets, obscuring your vision, billowing smoke from unseen acrid fires, murky shadows of buildings that are cracked and broken and lean as if they are about to fall down. You see nothing else for mile and miles and miles, and the whatever-it-is you have for a heart gives an uneasy _swoosh_.

Your daughter and wife had gone up to the human world for a little trip—apparently there were some things vampires couldn't find in the Nightosphere that they could in the human world.

Marceline was constantly asking to see something called _poodles_—your wife has told her endless stories about her own poodle, _before_. Before falling in love, before marrying you, before coming to live in the Nightosphere, where apparently poodles don't fare well.

And so your wife had floated over to you, placed a kiss on your cheek, and promised to be back within the day. Marceline, only as tall as your boots, had hugged your legs goodbye before you bent down and picked her up, placed your own kiss on her forehead, and told her to behave, be safe, and to listen to her mother.

But now your ragged breath and the hissing of the rain on dying fires is the only thing you can hear.

"Marceline!" you call. You know that if you find her, you will find your wife.

But there is no reply.

Your boots splash in watery mud as you try not to run—_don't panic_—going from sleek and shined and bright candy-apple red to grimy and slicked with dirt. You look everywhere, ruined building by ruined building—some collapse at the slightest touch and you hope that no one was inside. Others are sturdier, big glass things that thrust up halfway into the sky, and you check, floor by empty floor.

But no Marceline.

You turn a corner and think you see a flicker of her little gray dress—but it is only the tattered remains of _something_. You think you hear her call you, but it is only your imagination. You swear you smell your wife's perfume, but it is only a broken bottle leaking on the floor of someone's home.

As you spend more time in the human world, you begin to grow weary. There aren't even any _rats_—something notoriously hard to exterminate, as your wife had told you once.

No sun, no plants, no rats.

No life.

You spend days and days in the human world, searching, and damn the Nightosphere—it can run itself, for a few more days. You tell yourself this over and over, until the fires die out, until the smoke clears, until the rain peters out, until the last building falls over, until you feel something within you begin to change and you forget how long you have really been here.

You think maybe that change is just hope, dying and turning squishy-black, leaving a hollowness inside you.

Eventually, regretfully, guiltily, your whatever-it-is you have for a heart breaking every step of the way, you retreat to the Nightosphere, and the war of the humans spends itself above you.

.

It will only be six hundred years later that you finally find your daughter, half-grown and clutching a filthy teddybear, crying over a box of half-eaten fries.


End file.
